First post past the post

I've started this blog on the significant date of Easter Sunday 2014, to capture some of my thoughts with greater public visibility than they usually get.  The swift-thinking amongst my readers will already have noted that this is the same reason that almost every other blog on the planet exists.  So why bother with such a narcissistic indulgence?  Well, that's precisely what's prevented me from writing a blog up until this moment: being by nature quite a private person, I have had nothing to say that I wanted the entire world to know.  I haven't always been that way, but I do increasingly value that privacy - not least because the Internet provides a permanent record of everything you say digitally, no matter how much you'd rather expunge it!

In that case, what's changed?  Two things, really.  The first is my good lady wife's encouragement to share some of my thinking with others (she seems to hold the opinion that this might be helpful to some - I remain to be convinced!).  I tend to mull over things a lot, but articulate them little, and hence when I do, I don't express myself as well as I could.  Capturing it in typeface forces me to clarify that expression, so it may be that distilling long weeks and months of thought on particular issues into succinct, concise material will be of benefit to the one or two that might encounter it at some point.

The second motivator is an event: the end of Lent 2014.  46 days ago, I gave up using Facebook - what a long 6½ weeks that's been!  And I'm about to go back on.  In advance of doing so, though, I wanted to record my thoughts of the experience while they are fresh and unsullied by what I am about to consume....

Forgetting Facebook

So I've been off Facebook for 46 days.  I was beginning to wonder whether I was getting addicted to it, since it has been taking up a lot of time in my life.  Hence I decided almost on the spur of the moment to give it up, to see whether I would actually have more time in my day, and to make better use of that time.  How's it gone, then?

Well, to begin with, it was hard to feel so out of touch with what's been happening in people's lives: I felt like one of my hands had been cut off. I also was at a loss to know what to do at those times when I would otherwise have been riveted to FB.

But, as with any addiction, the cravings subsided after a while, and I started to feel a sense of relief at not:

• slavishly making sure that I had read/listened to/watched everything that everyone was posting;
• feeling compelled to come up with something pithy or witty to say, either as a status update or in response to someone else's;
• having to represent myself as someone different from or less than who I really am (the breadth of people with which one engages is such that unless one is a bit of a devil-may-care, one has to be fairly anodyne in what one posts, which partly defeats the purpose of doing so in the first place);
• feeling crushingly inadequate upon reading about everybody else's weekend / holiday / new car / extension / child's achievement (rather like getting a short Christmas letter of the kind you'd really rather not read, every day!);
• being depressed at the concentrated stream of bad news in the world;
• becoming outraged, gloomy or frustrated at opinions contrary to my own being expressed in an wholly inadequate medium for reasoned discussion within the context of wholesome friendship;
• Etc. (but I'll stop there, in case The Zuck or the NSA read this and I mysteriously disappear).

Looking at this list, Facebook sure doesn't come out looking good. So does that mean I'm ditching it for good? I've been tempted, I do confess.  The thing that stops me kicking it into touch altogether, though, is the contact with friends whom I value, but see very rarely.  Living 10,000 km away from where I grew up, with numerous non-intersecting circles of friends, makes it meaningful to maintain some continuity with people who have been special to me during times past, and whom seeing again in the flesh would be all the better for having had periodic interaction over the years.

So, I'm going to continue with it, but with three important lessons learned from the absence:

1. To ensure that local face-to-face friendships and relationships get priority, so that I avoid falling into the trap of existing in a mostly-digital world;
2. To leave the FB app off my iPhone, so that I'm not distracted by update notifications or tempted to check it every five minutes; and
3. To take a regular break from it, probably by giving it up for Lent each year, but maybe even more regularly than that (for shorter durations).

It'll be interesting to look back this time next year and see whether I've taken these lessons on board!

With that, I shall conclude this first utterance.  I'm sure that many could have said something more profound than this, and better too, but you have to start somewhere.  So this is it: "the end of the beginning".